I was visiting my cousin while she was babysitting our younger cousins, and they were put to bed and everything's fine. Literally the easiest kids ever to watch. It's about 30 minutes before the parents are coming home, dark out, and they're chill so we went outside to smoke a joint. Well they have a deck out on the second floor, and underneath it is a storage shed with a door and walls and stuff. So on the deck is a set of steps to get to ground level near the entrance to the little shed, with a kind of long plastic walking mat between it. Anyway, we're getting set up to smoke but we get sidetracked and just start bullshitting, joking about whatever.

My back is to the entrance and we hear it. It sounded kind of like dragging footsteps. It was on the plastic mat, these long, slow dragging noises. Just behind the wall next to the open shed door. And we look at each other, we were both hearing it. I tried to yell at them to knock it off, we're tired but hurry come join us thinking (hoping) it was the parents. No answer. We pop our heads out. No one. There was a few seconds between the end of the dragging noise, us calling them to come in, and us looking out. The entire neighbourhood is silent.

We go back inside and we're both really quiet, really just trying to listen. My cousin goes to use the bathroom and I was looking through their sliding door onto the deck, kind of wondering what it might've been or who could be fucking with us. Maybe we just imagined it, I don't know. Right next to their sliding door they had one of those hanging seashell things, and as I went to flick on their deck light just underneath it to get a better view of their yard I noticed it was being held up. Almost like a frozen pendulum. Jesus fuck, my stomach sank. I just stared at it, and within a second or two my cousin came back in the room just as it started swinging, as if it was let go.

We didn't say much to each other as we waited for the parents to come back. She checked on the kids a few more times, I did a couple sweeps around the house. The kids were fine. There was nothing to see. When the parents came home we finally smoked that joint.